The How Paintball Began story goes back to the 1960s when the Nelson Paint Company developed a gelatin shelled sphere filled with oil based paint. They first contracted airgun maker Crosman then later Daisy to make a CO2 powered air pistol to shoot this sphere. The original application for this paint and pistol combination was for loggers to mark trees and ranchers to mark cattle from truck or horseback. This first paintball gun was the NelSpot Paint Pistol basically an oversized version of an existing pellet pistol. In the late 1970s a group of friends Hayes Noel (a stock broker) Bob Gurnsey (a sporting goods retailer), and Charles Gaines (a writer) had for years discussed survival in the woods. Would someone with street smarts from the city be as successful as a country person with survival skills from the country? The debate went back and forth until 1981 when a friend discovered the Nel spot pistol in a farming catalog. With the equipment chosen Noel and Gurnsey sat down and wrote the rules to what they called The Survival Game.The How Paintball Began story goes back to the 1960s when the Nelson Paint Company developed a gelatin shelled sphere filled with oil based paint. They first contracted airgun maker Crosman then later Daisy to make a CO2 powered air pistol to shoot this sphere. The original application for this paint and pistol combination was for loggers to mark trees and ranchers to mark cattle from truck or horseback. This first paintball gun was the NelSpot Paint Pistol basically an oversized version of an existing pellet pistol. In the late 1970s a group of friends Hayes Noel (a stock broker) Bob Gurnsey (a sporting goods retailer), and Charles Gaines (a writer) had for years discussed survival in the woods. Would someone with street smarts from the city be as successful as a country person with survival skills from the country? The debate went back and forth until 1981 when a friend discovered the Nel spot pistol in a farming catalog. With the equipment chosen Noel and Gurnsey sat down and wrote the rules to what they called The Survival Game.